Cambridge resident raps in his own Element

It’s a stale scene, he said — a stagnant industry perpetuating an endless parade of trite and ultimately irrelevant MCs.

“There’s just too many rappers out there,” Trefts said. “The music’s kind of dead. Underground hip-hop 10 years ago was huge, but now it’s nothing.”

Trefts — a Central Square resident who, by night, answers to the MC name Elemental Zazen — may be right, but that isn’t stopping him from throwing himself into the scrum. A day before he was scheduled to headline a showcase at the Middle East, he sat down with the Chronicle to talk rap music, working for the state and a long series of personal tragedies, and how it is that their combination has thrust him to the front of Boston’s emerging hip-hop circuit.

Threfts, who works as a social worker by day, cut his first album in 2002, when he was 19, about a year after he moved to the U.S. from China. It was, by every measure, a solo project. He arranged and recorded every song by himself in his bedroom, and mastered and distributed the finished product on his own. Six years later, now backed by the boys and girls at Gnawledge Records, he finally released the long-awaited follow-up, “The Glass Should Be Full.”

“This is a much more professional album,” Threfts said.

Professional, indeed. The new record features beats from some of Beantown’s most in-demand producers — Kno, Maker and J Ferra, to name a few — and finds Threfts a much wiser and weather-tested MC than he ever thought he would be.

“It’s humbling,” Threfts said. “Everyone wants beats from these producers. If you don’t bring your A game, people are going to say, ‘Well, how the hell did that guy get the beats?’ A lot’s happened to me since that first album.”

When someone says a lot has happened to them over a given stretch of time, they usually mean they went through a bad break-up, got a new job or moved to a different city. Momentous occasions all in the course of a human life, to be sure, but when Threfts tells you he’s been through a lot in the six years between his two albums, it carries a bit more weight. All due respect to Hova, but if Jay-Z wants to know about a hard-knock life, he ought to come to Cambridge.

By 2004, Threfts had already beaten a heroin addiction, lived in his car for most of his senior year of college and been diagnosed manic depressive. Then, in January 2005, things really started to get bad. His 19-year-old cousin, and one of his closest friends in the world, was injured in a snowmobile accident. He was in a coma for almost four months before he died in April. Eighteen months later, Threft’s house in Dorchester burned to the ground with him inside. He survived, only to have more bad news hurled at him less than a year later.

In July 2007, after Threfts spent months regrouping and laying down tracks for the new album, doctors found a walnut-sized tumor attached to the vision center of his brain (a scan of which is featured inside the album). Through surgery, they were able to remove most of the cancerous tissue, but the disease remains. Threfts lost most of his vision in the process, and still isn’t legally permitted to operate anything with more horsepower than a bicycle.

These days, Threfts said he feels better. He’s off anti-depressants, finally a college graduate, and working for — of all places — the state Department of Mental Health. In a few months, he’ll move out to Seattle to pursue his Ph.D. A lot’s changed, but Threfts said the one constant through it all was his desire to rap. And though the events of his life do inform his music, Threfts said he strives not to let them define it.

“It’s been pretty crazy,” Threfts said. “I don’t want to be this big sob story. I just want people to be into the music.”